Earlier quoted context omitted.
People like to ascribe magic and mysticism to things they don't understand. Chat bots are similar. No way it is sentient.
What kind of evidence would you need to convince yourself of an AI being sentient?
I think the lack of this continuity is why people who feel they know how ChatGPT works feel confident it is not sentient. Sentience isn't simply responding to stimuli -- although we don't really understand consciousness, it clearly involves some kind of continuing sense of self, some kind of "dial tone" that provides the basic sense of continuing existence, and that isn't there in a bot that simply takes input and builds a response based on rules and data.